by Adam Frank
With the onset of the Great Depression in 1929, radio was one of the few businesses that continued to grow. As regular programming seeped into the everyday experience of Depression-era Americans, a new breed of celebrity was born. Amos & Andy, a comedy about two black taxicab owners, debuted in 1928.60 For years it was one of radio’s most popular programmes, settling into its nightly fifteen-minute broadcast on NBC at 7:00 p.m. Eastern time and then rebroadcast at 10:30.61 The two white actors, Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll, and their racially insensitive creations became the “presiding deities of the twilight time”, and they earned huge salaries. Like Amos & Andy, other radio shows and their stars drew large, consistent audiences each night as Americans began shaping their evenings around favourite programmes. In essence, people became trained to live on radio time through the popularity of shows such as Amos & Andy. But while other stars grew in the radio firmament, none shone as brightly during this first phase of broadcast culture as Rudy Vallee.
Born Hubert Prior Vallée, the handsome Yale graduate was a consummate performer.62 With his saxophone, crooning voice and meticulous eye for detail, he went from a job as a small-time bandleader to host of the longest-running and most beloved radio programme of the era. His break came in 1928. WABC lacked funds to hire an announcer during broadcasts of Vallee’s performances at the Heigh-Ho Club in New York.63 With no other options, the station gave Vallee the microphone and told him to announce his own shows. Thus came the introduction, destined to be repeated a thousand times, that would lead the great expansion of America’s broadcast universe: “Heigh-ho everybody, this is Rudy Vallee announcing and directing the Yale Collegians from the Heigh-Ho club at thirty-five east Fifty-third Street New York City.”64
By the early 1930s, Vallee owned the 8:00 p.m. Thursday slot on NBC as presenter of The Fleischmann’s Yeast Hour.65 It was Vallee who single-handedly created the concept of the variety programme, featuring music, comedy and even scenes from Shakespeare played by leading actors including Claude Rains and Jimmy Cagney. Like clockwork, every Thursday evening at eight o’clock, Americans (especially American women) turned their radio dials to Vallee’s show. The importance of Vallee to the American psyche is amply demonstrated by the infamous case of a husband in the Midwest who snidely asked his Vallee-obsessed wife, “Why don’t you get something worth listening to?” She promptly shot him dead and continued listening.66
By the mid-1930s, the country was deep into the golden age of radio. The medium was as ubiquitous in the lives of people then as the Internet is in ours now. Surveying transformations in the human experience of time across fifty thousand years of evolution, scholars often give emphasis to calendars and clocks—technologies that directly measure and parse time. The growth of radio demonstrates, once again, an entirely different movement in our use of time.
The development of radio broadcasting networks created two entirely new cultural experiences of time. The first was a shared simultaneity—a communal “now”—that manifested itself in sports, breaking news and hugely successful popular entertainment. Along with the possibility of a single “now” for Washington and New York, Boston and Chicago, Denver and Seattle, a new encounter with time was also established as people structured their lives around programming. Radio time was something new, the abstraction of programming schedules made concrete in the warp and woof of daily life. Seven o’clock was Amos & Andy time. Eight o’clock was Rudy Vallee time. The human movement through life directly implicated in the human movement through time had shifted once again.
Within just a few decades, radio would play a defining role in establishing the Big Bang and the universe with a beginning. But at the moments of its first inroads into culture, radio was not yet ready to be used by science as a tool for cosmos building. Instead, during the decades before World War II, researchers were hard at work organizing the framework for relativistic cosmology and taking their first steps towards a cosmology that answered fully to astronomical data.
UNIVERSES IN MOTION
At first it might seem strange to compare washing machines and radios to expanding universes. Washing machines are the stuff of day-to-day life; they are objects at hand, fashioned from enamelled steel, rubber and copper tubing. Radio sets are also material objects whose weight we can feel in our hands, even though their purpose is to capture invisible electromagnetic waves. The expanding universe, however, lives somewhere further afield, its reality lying at a location between ideas and facts proven by scientific practice. But as we have already seen, the proven facts of relativity could not be separated from the creosote-soaked telegraph poles that launched the first nascent experiences of dispersed simultaneity at the turn of the twentieth century. As astronomy and cosmology took their first steps towards each other in Hubble’s discovery of an expanding universe, the upwards and downwards movements of material engagement were seen everywhere. The human world and its image in cosmic science were both in the midst of rapid, profound and dizzying change.
What makes the first steps towards Big Bang cosmology so compelling was how fast scientists had to accommodate a new range of results and theories. In little more than a decade, the universe went from a single collection of stars to a vast and perhaps uncountable array of galaxies, each composed of billions of stars. From a cosmos composed of a single galaxy extending across, at most, a few hundred thousand light-years, the dimensions of the universe suddenly expanded a thousandfold and more. In that same time the universe, thought to be the very model of eternal quietude and repose, became an exploding manifold. The empty space of Newton’s universe was replaced by a dynamic space-time best imagined as an elastic fabric sweeping galaxies apart. In the midst of this new data, a tumult of ideas and explanations bubbled up like foam in a swiftly moving stream. The great questions of cosmology were being transformed from philosophical speculation into data points. No one was sure what to believe, what to expect or what would come next.
Scientists live in the real world no matter how abstract and removed their professional concerns might be. The enigmatic entanglement between cosmic and social time wove the two concerns together with the electric-powered threads of machines and instruments. Within a single decade, radio redefined what it meant to “be there” at events as diverse as boxing matches and ballroom dances. Current-driven machines compressed time and effort from days to hours and shifted both roles and expectations in the most intimate human frontier, the home. The skies began to fill with planes. Ships could stay in continuous contact with land. Cars became ubiquitous on an ever-expanding network of tarmac-covered roads. Everywhere and in every way, space and time were being redefined by culture through its machines. And the narratives of cosmology were changing just as completely and just as rapidly.
Chapter 7
THE BIG BANG, TELSTAR AND A NEW ARMAGEDDON
The Nuclear Big Bang’s Triumph in a Televised Space Age
BIKINI ATOLL, THE SOUTH PACIFIC • MARCH 1, 1953, 7:54 A.M., H+16 MINUTES
Jesus Christ! he thought. The water blew straight out of the toilet!
He was scared but that was to be expected. This was his first test shot, after all. It was the other guys in from the bunker who worried him, the ones who had seen atomic explosions before. They were looking pretty scared now too and that was really terrifying.
He was outside the bunker, looking straight up at the blue Pacific sky and the mushroom cloud, pure white, towering twenty miles overhead.1 My God, he thought, what power! For months he had been looking forward to this very moment, but now, as the minutes ticked off and the radiation level ticked upwards, he just wanted to get away from this terrible place.
Everything had gone smoothly in the run-up to the detonation. This was “Castle Bravo,” the first in the Castle series of U.S. hydrogen bomb tests. They were using a different design for the nuclear detonator this time, but that seemed like just a detail to him. All the previous tests out here in the Pacific had gone off fine. After the final inspection of the “package” out on the atoll t
he head scientists had helicoptered the miles back to the control bunker. The countdown was tense but that was no surprise either. Countdowns were supposed to be tense.
It was his job to call out the time: “H minus 15 seconds, H minus 10 seconds . . .” At preciously 6:45 a.m. the switches were thrown and they waited. With no windows in the bunker, they were blind to the blast. From a ship many miles away the test results were radioed in: “Detonation achieved.”
Everyone cheered. Then, quickly, they braced themselves for the ground shock that might or might not come.
It came all right, that was for goddamn sure. And it was nothing like what they’d told him to expect. The building pitched like a seesaw. It lasted only seconds but it felt like an eternity. Then another one hit. He had to drop to the floor to keep from being tossed over. A few seconds later, the blast wave from the multimegatonne explosion swept over them. The concrete bunker trembled like an old wooden frame house. That was when the water shot straight up out of the toilet. It terrified him but the others just laughed it off like it was some kind of amusement ride. To the experienced guys, it seemed like it was all big fun. But that was before they started measuring the radiation.
FIGURE 7.1. The Castle Romeo nuclear test. Castle Romeo was part of a series of explosions in the Operation Castle series. Romeo was conducted on March 27, 1954, and yielded an eleven-megatonne explosion, the largest up to that point. The nuclear science behind these weapons was the same as that used in Big Bang “nucleosynthesis” cosmology.
At first everything seemed okay. The numbers on the Geiger counter were rising but the level was in the safe zone. Then the chief got worried. The radiation levels jumped so fast he had to change settings on the Geiger counter even to get a reading. Something was going wrong, really wrong. One of the military guys said rad levels in the bunker were past dangerous and the rooms in the other facilities were much worse. There was no place they could go.
Now everyone was being called inside. Christ, they were all going to be trapped.2
NUCLEAR AGES IN COSMOLOGY AND CULTURE
The Castle Bravo test at Bikini Atoll was the worst radiation contamination event in U.S. history.3 The twenty-two-megatonne explosion was almost three times more powerful than expected and a change in wind direction dropped radioactive fallout on U.S. scientists and sailors scattered on ships across hundreds of miles.4 It is estimated that three hundred people received dangerous levels of radiation exposure.5 A Japanese fishing vessel with the unfortunate name of Lucky Dragon No. 5 was caught at the edge of the “safe zone”. Fallout rained down on the unprotected and unwarned fishermen, and soon they fell severely ill. A week later, one of the Lucky Dragon’s crew died. Fallout from Castle Bravo drifted to Australia, India, Japan and even the United States and parts of Europe. While the test was supposed to be secret, it quickly became an embarrassing international incident, driving calls for atmospheric test bans and providing a palpable reminder that any thermonuclear exchange would have global consequences. For many, the end of human time was feeling like a distinct possibility.
Atomic and nuclear weapons were the direct material manifestations of the two great scientific revolutions of the twentieth century. The first revolution was Einstein’s relativity. It was his unification of matter and energy, in the ubiquitous equation E=mc2, that gave the weapons their godlike powers of destruction. Only a gram or so of matter need be fully transformed to energy and a mighty city could be vaporized.6 But what is matter? What, truly, is its nature and its constituent parts? Those questions lay at the heart of the century’s other great scientific overturning—quantum physics.
By the end of the nineteenth century, physicists began constructing a new generation of experimental devices that allowed them access to the world on increasingly smaller scales. Atomism, the Greek doctrine of a universe composed of minute but fundamental flecks of matter, made its return. It was reincarnated not as philosophy but as the end point of experimental investigation.
As experiments reached down to regions measured in billionths of a metre, physicists were suddenly able to probe a staggering array of new phenomena: the atomic basis of heat, the nature and behaviour of atoms and their constituent parts, the subtle relationships between light, energy and matter.7 These were domains of nature that scientists had never accessed before and bewildering new behaviours were unveiled by the experiments. As physicists confronted the world through their new instruments, they were forced to radically alter their approach to, and conception of, physical reality. They often ran headlong into their own conceptual biases while working to reveal the properties of atoms.
Attempts to make sense of the experiments using the physics of the day, what we now call classical physics, failed entirely. Classical physics contains a heavy dose of gut-level intuition, the fruit of millions of years of evolution and the hardwired physics modules working in our brains. This intuition rises from our direct experience of the world at our own scale: the resistance of a heavy stone being pushed aside, the lurch of our stomach when we fall. The new physics did not rise from this kind of evolved experience. Instead the rules governing atoms seemed to mock the imperatives of our intuitive physics.
During the first three decades of the twentieth century, physicists such as Niels Bohr in Denmark, Werner Heisenberg in Germany and Paul Dirac in England responded to the new data and new questions with bold conceptual leaps. In a phenomenal display of human creativity, these scientists reached beyond their own training and created an entirely new branch of physics we now call quantum mechanics.8
The quantum mechanical articulation of atomic behaviour was stunning in its speed and completeness. By the late 1920s, physicists had worked out the structure of elements down to the exquisite details. Democritus had got it right two thousand years earlier: every element, from the lightest hydrogen gas to the heaviest lump of uranium, could be decomposed into tiny atoms. But atoms, the physicists found, were not the lowest level of structure. Every atom was made up smaller fundamental particles. At the atom’s centre, carrying most of its mass, was a nucleus composed of nucleons: electrically charged protons and electrically neutral neutrons. Surrounding the nucleus was a swarm of orbiting electrons. All atoms were electrically neutral, with equal numbers of negatively charged electrons balancing out the positively charged protons.
A classical physicist hears that atoms are made up of smaller particles and she imagines they look and behave much like microscopic billiard balls. These little spheres should bounce into each other, spin, hold an electron charge and react to gravity or magnetic fields. Most important, she would imagine the tiny specks of matter to possess definite properties. Those properties should be measurable to any degree of accuracy (just as you could precisely measure the position of a cue ball on a pool table). The problem with this kind of common sense was that it did not hold up on the microscopic level. Physicists quickly found that it was impossible to build working, predictive theories—that is, mathematical models—using the billiard ball model of atoms. Nature, it seemed, was just not built that way. As Werner Heisenberg once said, “Atoms are not things.”9
There were many surprises in the new quantum description of subatomic reality but two aspects would come to stand out. The first was embodied in the word quantum, which is Latin for “how much”.10 Classical physics imagines the world to be composed of objects whose properties appear in a smooth continuum. A bicycle can travel at five miles an hour, ten miles an hour or any speed in between. A ball can be dropped from five feet above the floor, ten feet above the floor or any height in between. In the quantum world all critical facets of physical reality are quantized—they appear only in discrete divisions. The energy of an electron orbiting a nucleus can take on only specific quantized values and nothing in between. When the electron changes its physical state, it jumps from one discrete value of energy to the other without ever having the intermediate values. It’s like climbing a staircase by only appearing and disappearing on the steps.
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sp; Along with quantum jumps in physical properties, the new physics also forced scientists to give up their cherished notion of pure causation. When Thales began the Greeks’ inquiry into nature 2,500 years earlier he bequeathed to his students the idea that all physical effects were assumed to have direct physical causes. Likewise, every cause had to have a definite and well-defined effect. If randomness did exist in the world, it was really only the result of our ignorance. We think that rolling dice and probabilities go together only because we do not have perfect knowledge of every atom in the dice. If we did, the classical Newtonian picture of the world tells us, we could predict with certainty how the dice would roll every time (and make ourselves a lot of money in the process). But at the atomic level even this idealization falls away.
Quantum events are subject to an inherent uncertainty built into nature. Radioactive decay is the archetypal quantum mechanical event. When the nucleus of a radioactive element decays, it sheds some of its constituents and transmutes into a different isotope (the same element with fewer neutrons) or another element altogether (with a different number of protons). In a clear affront to classical sensibilities, there is no way to predict exactly when an individual radioactive nucleus will decay. It is an event that is fundamentally random. The technical term for this is acausal (without cause). Radioactive decay is an acausal process.11 Quantum mechanics can give exquisitely accurate probabilities that describe large collections of nuclei and their behaviour, but predicting the fate of an individual nuclei simply cannot be done. On the atomic and subatomic levels, nature does not behave that way. Quantum mechanics raised uncertainty to the level of a fundamental physical principle.
As the 1920s ended, physicists turned from atoms as a whole to the inner workings of the nucleus. A basic understanding of what made a nucleus of helium (two protons and two neutrons) different from a nucleus of carbon (six protons and six neutrons) was slowly fleshed out. As the nuclear nature of the elements was teased apart, an important question made its first appearance: How had these nuclei been born and what set their abundances? A causal survey of the elements made it clear that some, including hydrogen, were common and others, such as gold, were not. It was through this question of elemental abundances that nuclear physics and quantum mechanics stood poised to make their entrance in cosmological theory.12
